Star Trek: The Next Generation: April Q

After dodging Will Riker's idea of good clean fun on April
Fool's Day all day long, Picard was not really in the mood to do anything but
take a shower and sit down with a cup of tea and a nice relaxing book in his
quarters.

So of course Q showed up.

"Mon capitaine!
How are you this delightful evening?"

"I was considerably better a moment ago, before I saw
you," Picard grated out.
"What are you doing on my ship?"

"What do you think I'm doing?
Hmm.
Oh, I know-- here."
He snapped his fingers, and his hand
filled with a giant bouquet of long-stemmed roses, which he handed to
Picard. "Take this as a token of my
adoration, mon cher." His
voice had become a parody of a male romantic lead, which was a fairly good clue
to Picard that there was no sincerity in the comment. Picard took the roses to
get them out of his face and promptly dropped them on his desk.

"What do you mean by this nonsense, Q?"

"But isn't it Valentine's Day?" Q asked, smirking.
"The day for all you humans to express
your undying love and desire to copulate messily with one another?
Dear me, do I have the date wrong?"
He smacked himself in the forehead. "Oh,
of course! Your little years
go by so quickly, Picard, it totally slipped my mind."

"Somehow I think you know exactly what day it is, Q," Picard
growled.

"Oh yes, of course I do," Q said, not so much smirking
anymore as grinning. "And a
delightful holiday it is. Really,
you should have seen the look on your face when I gave you those roses."

"As a practical joke, giving me roses doesn't seem up to your
usual standards. Where are the
tests? The undesired excursions
into other timelines? The random
transformations of members of my crew?
You've spent so much time playing practical jokes when it's not
April Fool's Day that I can't see any need for you to celebrate the
holiday. Besides, what significance
can a human holiday possibly have to a Q?"

"You'd be surprised.
Many of us find any number of mortal holidays significant."
Q leaned in conspiratorially.
"I have a friend who throws the most
amazing bashes on the Klingon Day of Honor."

"I wouldn't have thought you'd have an interest in the
Klingon Day of Honor."

"Oh, I don't.
But my friend is somehow under the misapprehension that Klingons are
actually interesting, and well, in the Continuum we take any excuse for a
party. Which is why I'm here.
I want to do something for you for April
Fool's."

"Practical jokes.
Ha!" Q paced, throwing his
arms in the air. "You have no idea
what this holiday is really about, do you?
Even with your fascination with the past
... no, it's all about puerile jokes.
And yet it has so much potential.
Did I mention how much I like this
holiday?"

"Several times.
And I did ask why.
How could an immortal, omnipotent being place any emphasis on Earth's
solar calendar? You said it
yourself-- our years must go by in an eyeblink to you.
Why do you care?"

"Because it's the only holiday you have to celebrate
me."

"You?"

"Well, not me personally.
My archetype.
The god I'd be, if I were your god.
The trickster.
See, we godlike entities very often find
that mortals, in the course of personifying their own archetypes, will find some
important aspect of our own personalities, and celebrate it.
There are Q who are fond of Christmas
and other winter party holidays.
There are Q who have an inordinate love for Valentine's Day.
I actually know someone who thinks your
Bastille Day was somehow a good idea.
April Fool's is the only holiday humanity currently celebrates which is
dedicated to the archetype of the trickster, of reversing the natural order, of
misrule and chaos and fun."

"If you don't count Halloween."

"Oh, well, Halloween has its place, I suppose, but there's
two major aspects to it that bore me to tears.
Firstly, it's all about you humans
coming to terms with your mortality, and lacking your mortality I just can't be
bothered with that. Secondly it's
overly emphatic about acquiring material goods."

"I think you mean Christmas."

"No, I mean candy.
I suppose acquiring tooth-rotting quantities of refined sugar must be
entertaining for people that eat, but since I don't, I find it tedious beyond
belief. I do like the costumes,
though. But no, Halloween doesn't
really do it for me. April Fool's,
now there's a holiday. You
know, in the old days they used to take some poor beggar and crown him king for
the day. Harlots became noblewomen,
good merchant girls dressed as harlots.
The world turned upside down.
Now that's entertainment."

"That's not the sort of thing we can afford to indulge in on
a starship," Picard said. "If I
took some ensign and made him Captain for the day, what would happen if we were
attacked by Romulans, or encountered a spatial anomaly, or any number of other
things? We need to maintain a
constant state of readiness."

"What if I personally guaranteed to you that nothing
bad would happen requiring your crew's intervention in anything?"

"Then I'd still be suspicious.
Why would you want to do such a
thing?"

"Well, you wouldn't party with me when I got my powers
back. I just want to spend my
favorite human holiday with my favorite humans. And favorite android and
favorite annoying half-Betazoid and if favorite Klingon wasn't an oxymoron...
but you get the idea."

Picard sighed.
"If I say no, you're just going to do it anyway, aren't you?"

Q beamed. "How
well we've come to understand each other."

"What did you have in mind?"

"Oh, the things we could do, Picard.
We could go back to 15th century England
and participate in an April Fool's production there.
We could go have adventures on an
imaginary planet. We could decorate
the Enterprise in green and chartreuse and declare ourselves the United
Federation of Hairdressers' Starship.
We could send missives to Starfleet Command explaining that the
Cardassians had all turned into small pink furry wombats.
In fact we could turn the Cardassians
into small pink furry wombats, at least for the day.
Oh, the things we could do!"

"I think," Picard said gently, "that perhaps we'd better
stick with a ship-wide party. And
costumes. And perhaps a Captain for
the day."

"Mmm ... okay," Q said.
"But I get to pick the Captain.
There's this little girl, you've met her, she was stuck in a turbolift
with you once, name's Marrissa Flores.
I absolutely think she should get to be captain for the day."

"Why her?"

Q snickered.
"Believe me, Jean-Luc, there are things you just don't want to know about
the multiverse."

Picard decided to ignore that.
"Actually, that sounds like a fine
idea. While I'm not the biggest fan
of children, if we are going to have a party based around April Fool's the idea
of including the children, and letting them play the parts of important bridge
crew, seems splendid to me.
However, I will not pretend to be a child.
I've already done that, and frankly,
once was far too often."

"So it's settled? We're having a party?"
Q's eyes had gone comically wide, as if
pretending to be a small child waiting for Christmas.
"I'll get the decorations!"

"Just don't go overboard," Picard said tiredly.

As it happened, once the staff could be convinced that the
best way to make Q go away was to humor his request for a party, the party
itself went surprisingly well. A
host of pre-teens was elected Senior Staff for the day, Beverly and Data staged
an impromptu presentation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with Beverly reading
all the women's roles and Data all the men, there were costumes and silliness
and a ceremonial dunking of Riker in a giant fishtank that had appeared embedded
in the floor of Ten-Forward like an inground swimming pool, and all in all,
Picard had to admit it was actually not a bad idea, as Q ideas went.

Of course, there was the card that had manifested itself next
to the roses, which said, "The truth is, I meant it about the token of
adoration, Jean-Luc," but Picard was able to convince himself it was just
another April Fool's joke.